Autumn Has Departed
by Karanguni
Summary: After the stigma comes the cleansing. Everyone in Shinra has their own forms of absolution; Tseng's is pilgrimage. Set after AC. Slight spoilers for CC.


_If I knew the way  
I'd seek it out and set forth too;  
With scarlet leaves  
Woven into offerings,  
Autumn has departed. _

* * *

Winter had never come to Midgar, not the real winters of whiteness and ice. The city had been too grey for that, always kept warm by the stream of Mako that threaded through its buildings and under its streets. The concrete would, on the coldest of nights, steam mist and strange precipitation: Midgar would go damp, cold, wretched with dirty rain, but Midgar had never seen snow.

Snowfall hit the tops of Shinra tower the year after the rains came. At first a whisper with the wind, then a chorus with the rain. It painted the remains of what had been Tseng's empire -- had it really been his? shared between so-and-so many men? -- a blinding blank, as if to absolve, or to bury with white ash what had once burned with black.

Tseng left footprints in the snow when he walked out into what had once been Sector 6. The broken buildings littered the ghost of the place; skeletons and memories. Rufus walked beside him. 'Why come back here?' the President asked, even if he was the President no more. The title was an old foil to their companionship that they both liked to have in place. Time had turned Rufus into a different man, even if it had done little to erode past personalities. Some would comment that it'd _only_ taken the end of the world to change him; Rufus would say that he had a troubled adolescence.

'There's something I need to do,' Tseng replied, tucking cold fingers into his pockets and gazing West. He could see the filtered smoke trails from the coal trains that led ever onwards. 'Some places that I need to visit.'

Rufus sighed, and his breath clouded the air for a moment before clearing. 'Is this your way of doing things?' the blond asked, waving one hand in the air, an ambiguous motion. Tseng was still hard to second guess; subterfuge had been bred into his bones, and some of it remained, evident in the Turk's quietude.

'Not everyone can build nations, Rufus,' Tseng answered dryly, scuffing his leather shoes into the newly-formed ice just to get the feel of it beneath his soles. The new city was a two hour's drive away, and, like its forefather, it was too warm for snow. 'I don't have billions of gil to put in the coffers of restoration projects, nor do I have the kind of ambition that you have.'

'Ambition has very little to do with what I've been managing in Edge,' the man whose money bought jobs, oil fields and industry pointed out, attempting sharpness but getting humour. 'After the stigma, and Kadaj, you'd think I'd have learnt my lesson.'

'You learn your lessons perfectly fine,' Tseng said, his lips turning upwards. 'You also never forget your old ones. Your apologies must be public, and perversely large in scale. You'll never be content with a house and your own two hands.'

'I'm Rufus Shinra,' Rufus Shinra said, shrugging. 'This city was my home, and now it's gone. Makes sense that I build a new one.'

'Makes sense that you cannot leave it to others to build it for you,' Tseng corrected him. 'Makes sense that your _redemption_ is more a campaign than a consolation.'

'Self-pity won't generate electricity.' Rufus kicked a small piece of debris out of their path. Once upon a time it had been part of the behemoth metal ladder that had run up the side of Reactor Six. In its molecules was the memory of Mako and magic, all of which had now gone back to ground. _Saving the Planet_, Reeve called the initiative. Rufus had sworn at him over the phone and told him that Reeve was a fucking idiot if he and his _WRO_ thought that it could shut all the local reactors down in one year and still have a functioning city of over two million souls. 'Two hundred Plate survivors froze to death, and that was after the stigma.'

'I know the numbers as well as you do,' Tseng nodded, his eyes flat and dark. 'My apologies are simply more private than yours, sir.'

When they reached it, they stood for a long while in silence under the remains of the reactor, staring up its graffiti-laden sides. Rufus' shoulders brushed against Tseng's when they turned away and headed back to the new beginnings of their new city. 'It must be harder,' the blond observed as they retraced their way, 'to repay debts to dead people than it is to repay debts to a living planet.'

'We shall see,' Tseng said, but it would have been a lie to say that he had not known that truth long before.

'Take all the time you need,' Rufus told him afterwards. 'Just make sure to come back when you're done.'

'You try to commit suicide too often when I'm not looking,' Tseng replied, his face absolutely straight. 'I don't want to have to end up apologising for your stupidity as well.'

* * *

He considered, while packing, not bringing his ties or his shirts or his blazer, but then he realised that to put them away would be to go naked and hiding, so he left them in his small bag and boarded the outward bound train as he was and had always been.

If there was one thing that worked in the teeming wreck of Edge, it was the giant system of massive old locomotives that had been set up in the aftermath. _The aftermath_, everyone from Midgar called it, unwilling to put a name to the forces that had taken their city and crumbled the homes that they'd built. Of those who remained, some tried to build - others tried to run, and run they did, to every corner of the earth they could find and remember. Men born to Kalmish parents who'd never seen a real chocobo feather in their lives went back to farms they didn't know how to run; women who shivered in the light chill of Midgar's nights returned to the snowbound hills behind the Icicle area.

The station was busy and the carriage crowded on the day he left, but Tseng found the seats beside him constantly empty, and the looks that he received constantly cold. It did not bother him; that, too, was a kind of absolution. Perhaps the aftermath didn't need a name; Shinra provided that easily enough, and now Shinra bore the consequences.

Tseng went west, towards Wutai. A decade ago - had it really been that long? - he would have sat in a helicopter and pretended not to hear the voice of an over-eager SOLDIER as it cut through the _whung whung_ of rotor blades and high-altitude air.

_So how much more than us Second classes do you get paid, huh? A lot? Or just a little? Come on, man, spill!_

'Ten thousand,' Tseng said to the window of the train, watching as the metropolis dropped away behind him. 'Ten thousand gil more than you every month.'

They'd paid him a lot more than Zack, because Zack'd fought men on a field of honour while Tseng'd murdered innocents in a city of deceit. Fair trade, by old standards. Tseng donated over one point two million to Cloud's orphanage after the liquidity in their accounts had been restored; ten thousand multiplied by twelve months multiplied by ten years. Fair trade, by old standards indeed.

He slept the rest of the way, and got off at a dusty station in the middle of the desert halfway between Midgar and Gongaga. He walked four hours from dawn till high noon, following a the trucker's trail that connected Nibelheim to the old capital. The air was hard on the lungs and the sun beat down mercilessly from an open blue sky, but Tseng ignored the sweat and the discomfort and wondered, instead, how it must have been to have hitch-hiked down the road with an injured friend by his side, desperate to get away from the sight and sound of Heidegger's army.

When Tseng reached the dusty plateau where Cissnei had found Zack's body an aeon ago, he stood there for a while, respectfully quiet as he gazed at the white flowers that were laid, unadorned and anonymous, on the hard rock. Their petals were drying out now, the stalks withered to show that they were maybe two days, half a week old. Cloud came out often enough that it wasn't surprising to find them.

His own offering was less poetic; Tseng took from his bag a sheaf of papers some of them old mission reports, some of them accounts of damages done by his department, one of them was even the letter of command that Rufus had put in his hand (_ terminate the Director of Administrative Research (TURKS) Vel _).

He put them on the ground and then set them on fire; paper burned easily, even if the memories didn't. The only thing poetic that Tseng really managed was a coincidence of numbers; there were eighty-eight sheets there, and maybe next year he'd burn eighty-eight more, and keep burning them until he was out of histories worth erasing.


End file.
